Friday, November 2, 2018

Rock and roll has long seemed wedded to the movies despite the fact that
film started a good 50 years before those percussive, jangling refrains
entered the mainstream. But the immediacy, intimacy, and gigantism of that
shimmering screen is so related to the feeling of excess engendered in rock
and pop that it can seem like they have always been intertwined. (A movie
like Rebel Without a Cause was so steeped in the youthful mythos
of rock that it’s still surprising to realize it was released before rock existed as a mass phenomenon.) Thus it’s no surprise that the lives
of rock gods and goddesses have served as fodder for numerous screenplays
and treatments. The rock-and-roll biopic is a genre unto itself. The best
of these pictures tend to hinge on who portrays the pop deity – if the actor
is able to tear into both the myth and reality of their subject, the
results can be spectacular, even if the movie itself is so-so. Jamie Foxx
was terrific as Ray Charles, Joaquin Phoenix’s astonishing turn as Johnny
Cash, and to a lesser extent, Reese Witherspoon’s as June Carter Cash,
still haunt me, and Jessica Lange’s Patsy Cline was a revelation. (Lange
also had the great fortune to have Robert Getchell writing sharp, incisive
dialogue for her.) Both Paul Dano and John Cusack broke my heart as The Beach
Boys’ Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, and Beyoncé was
mesmerizing as Etta James in the too little-seen Cadillac Records,
to name just a few. Even if the movie is out-and-out terrible, a great star
turn can make the experience worthwhile. It’s hard to see how Lady Sings the Blues could be much worse, just as it’s almost as
hard to see how Diana Ross’s performance could be much better. (Go have the
argument whether Lady is a jazz or blues biopic somewhere else:
Ross’s performance is pure rock and roll.) But rock cinema is also riddled
with great promise greatly denied: Dennis Quaid put all sorts of effort
into his portrayal of Jerry Lee Lewis, but never really came to life. Val
Kilmer’s Jim Morrison was stillborn (perhaps due to director Oliver Stone’s
apparent belief there’s no greater rock star than himself), and let’s not
talk about Kevin Spacey’s Bobby Darin.

There are so many conventions to these stories that unless either the
performers or the filmmakers can effectively dramatize them, or upend the
convention, all you get is lifeless cliché. There’s the formation of the
band, the struggle to get heard, the playing to hostile audiences in lousy
clubs. There’s also that magic moment when the artist first hears their
song played on the radio. (That’s a scene that always works for me: long
may it live.) Then there are the excesses of fame which threaten to destroy
the artist’s career, followed by either the tragic crash (sometimes
literally) or the triumphant comeback. The script writes itself! (All too
often, in fact.)

Which brings us to Bohemian Rhapsody, the new movie about the band
Queen and its flamboyant lead singer Freddie Mercury. Amidst all sort of
rumors about casting and directing difficulties (among the men previously
named to play the lead were Sasha Baron Cohen and Ben Whishaw; the
direction is credited to Bryan Singer, who quit showing up for work before
shooting was finished, citing a family crisis), as well as reports that
members of the band didn’t want the film to mention Mercury’s homosexuality
or death from AIDS, the long-anticipated movie is finally here, with Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek undertaking the starring role. (Malek is an
Egyptian-American actor portraying the Indian-Parsi Mercury, who was born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, moving to England with his family in his late teens.) I watched the
first season of Mr. Robot, a cult hit for the USA Network, and
while Malek is clearly a great camera subject, with striking, wide-set, heavy-lidded eyes, he never really did much with those gifts, content
merely to let the camera gaze upon him. Still, I was curious what he would
do with the role of Mercury, a character about as far from his work in Robot as possible.

Rami Malek and Lucy Boynton in Bohemian Rhapsody.

I should confess that Queen was a band I never much warmed to. Their
over-the-top, “operatic” sound and campy songs, culled from a mishmash of
inspirations and musical sources, never really cohering with each other,
left me cold. Their albums seemed a collection of singles comfortably at
home among the novelty numbers played on the old Dr. Demento radio show. (“I
want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike”: how the hell did that
ever become a hit?) Nothing held the band’s work together other than
Mercury’s undeniable vocal range and power and Brian May’s electric
Creamsicle guitar sound. (I guess it says something that no one has ever
sounded like either of them.) Their only music I have affection for is the
soundtrack to the hugely enjoyable Flash Gordon. All that
extravagant, pseudo-operatic overdubbing turned out to be a perfect fit for
that wonderfully witty and visually hallucinogenic comic-strip movie.

But back to Bohemian Rhapsody: It won’t surprise anyone that the
climax is the band’s much-lauded 1985 performance at Live Aid, the benefit
concert held simultaneously in the United States and in London. (Phil
Collins famously took the supersonic jet Concorde to play at both venues.
Nobody I knew wanted to see him at either site.) I was among its record
world-wide television audience of over 1.9 viewers, watching much of the
coverage (too much, in fact), but I missed Queen’s set. Hearing all the
praise afterward surprised me, and I’ve since been curious about that
performance. It is reproduced here in its entirety, and it’s
also the sequence where Malek finally comes alive as an actor. Portraying
Mercury holding court over the 72,000 people singing in unison at Wembley
Stadium, Malek has a fire in his eyes he hasn’t possessed before. Roaming
and prowling the stage, he finally gives life to Mercury and you have an
inkling of the charisma that made so many people fans of his and the
band’s. The CGI work here to incorporate the actors into old footage of the
crowd works well, and you’re convinced, through Malek, that Mercury was
able to spellbind a crowd that large. The Live Aid sequence was the first
footage shot by Singer and his crew, but as entertaining as it is,
unfortunately it also seems they shot their wad. Even worse, the slavish
restaging of the scene means that it doesn’t serve any real dramatic
vision, other than offering a higher-quality viewing experience than the
original TV footage.

As you might have surmised by now, the movie’s screenplay is a dull,
by-the-numbers job. The great Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen) has a story credit, so I suspect somewhere in Morgan’s
desk drawer there’s an amazing script that got rejected, but the named
screenwriter, Anthony McCarten (Darkest Hour, The Theory of Everything), is content to go the Wikipedia route
and tell us everything we already know in chronological order. Until the
final Live Aid sequence, the film is a snooze. Malek mostly seems to be
struggling with his prosthetic overbite and the excess saliva it causes. He
might as well be Mr. Robot. We see Freddie in conflict with his immigrant
family. We see Freddie talk his way into the band. We see the band start to
have some success. We see Freddie struggle with drugs and his sexuality.
You get the rest.

Ben Hardy and Joseph Mazzello in Bohemian Rhapsody.

As the band, Gwilym Lee (May), Ben Hardy (drummer Roger Taylor), and Joseph
Mazzello (bassist John Deacon) have an easygoing rapport that lets you
believe in them both as a group and as second fiddles to their preening
front man. Allen Leech (Downton Abbey) plays the thankless role of
the enabling handler who supplies Freddie with drugs and hustlers while
poorly disguising his own desire. (It doesn’t seem credible that Mercury
never gratifies him, given Leech’s own good looks. Freddie sleeps with
almost everyone else, why not him?) Lucy Boynton (wonderful in Sing Street, a lovely little fable that gets at the mythology of
rock far more successfully than this film) has a dud assignment of her own,
as Freddie’s gradually abandoned wife who nevertheless helps him accept his
homosexuality. Mike Myers shows up in heavy disguise as a record exec who
signs the band – it’s a shorter, cockney version of his turn as the nightclub
impresario Steve Rubell in 54. There’s nothing there. Tom
Hollander and Aiden Gillen manage to be relatively fine as suits who help
the band along.

Singer (cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel allegedly shot some scenes
after Singer’s departure, and Dexter Fletcher was in charge of the final
two weeks of the schedule) can’t really manage any excitement, visually,
dramatically, or aurally. There is one entertaining fillip midway that made
me laugh out loud: after the band has released their “masterpiece,” the
title song, the screen is overtaken by printed quotes from rock critics
excoriating it. It’s the one knowing moment in the entire movie. (I guess I
understand why “Bohemian Rhapsody” appeals to people, in the same way that
“Total Eclipse of the Heart” does, but boy, are they both godawful.)

The rest of the movie just proceeds with telling you things you already
know. Even the expertly copied Live Aid sequence fails to make the case for
Queen as a group of importance. Yes, Mercury had an amazing connection with
his audience when he performed. So does Neil Diamond, allegedly, but that
doesn’t mean I’m buying a ticket any time soon. By simply replicating
Queen’s most famous appearance, the filmmakers abrogate their duty to place it in any sort of artistic context, to provide any dramatic
insight. If the film had any style to it, if the scenes of decadence had
any wit or humor, if the makers had somehow been able to communicate where
the music was coming from, or if there was any inkling of what
Mercury and the others were trying to achieve with those songs,
there might have been something worthwhile to watch, but all we’re left
with is the knowledge that Queen wanted to write and record hits. That
makes them successful businessmen, not artists, and you can’t get less rock
and roll than businessmen, however essential they might be to its
promotion. There’s nothing rhapsodic, or even really Bohemian, about Bohemian Rhapsody.

– Joe Mader has written on film and worked as a theater critic for various publications
including the SF Weekly, TheSan Francisco Examiner, Salon.com, and TheHollywood Reporter. He previously served as the managing director for the San Francisco
theater company 42nd Street Moon. He currently works at Cisco Systems and
writes on theater for his own blog, Scene 2.